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We are a national association of Bisbee Families and friends who
have a common interest in each other and in our family heritage.

The first Bisbees arrived at Plymouth Colony from England in 1635 and married
into many of the Mayflower families who founded the colony
fifteen years earlier.

As the name suggests, the Bisbee Family Connection was formed in 1988
to connect us, to organize national family reunions and to share
our family history.

We hope you enjoy our Family History database, and that you
will consider helping us make this the most complete and accurate
source of such information by sharing with us your Bisbee facts,
artifacts, and anecdotes.

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Bisbee Family Website Updated

The Bisbee Family History website has been updated with a new look. We are
also catching up with information received in the past few months
and will be adding updated research on Bisbee family lines everywhere.
We hope you like it.

Suggestions for improving the webiste are always welcome. If you are
interested in more direct participation, please see the article "From the
Administrator" below.

*If you have announcements or newspaper articles
of general interest to our members, please send them to us and we will
post them here. This would include Bisbee birth, death or wedding
announcements.

Obituaries

Using the website is easy!

If you are looking for a particular person, we suggest you start with
our name search on the left. Enter part or all of the name. If you
know the middle initial, enter it without the period to get everyone
with middle names starting with that initial. You can also try our
Advanced Search if you know other details
about the person's life.
Our surname listing is helpful if you are
unsure of the spelling.

If you find someone who might be of further interest, you can bookmark
their family history pages to easily find them on your next visit.

Be sure to check all our features using the links and drop down
menus above. On This Date gives
you a listing of persons who were born, married or died on today's date
in history. You might also enjoy our web
site Statistics and
What's New pages.

In many ways, the web site is like "Granny's attic" - be prepared
to spend time exploring it. Keep in mind, we are adding new
information all the time, so if you don't find what you are looking
for, bookmark us and keep checking back, or subscribe to our website RSS feed
to have your browser automatically check for updates and additions.

The original English family name was Besbeech with several variations of the spelling. The
most common, but not only form of the name today is Bisbee. There have been and still are
other versions, including Bisbe, Bisbey, and Bisby. A few early families argued over it, but
for the most part, differences in spelling just weren't important to them at a time when
there were no birth certificates, no drivers licenses, no Social Security cards, etc. Many
Individuals used different spellings in their own lifetimes. We even have an example where
two brothers signed their name differently on the same legal document! The Website has
made a conscious decision to use Bisbee for those in the database who have used variations
in the past. If we have a modern family using a variation, we will honor it as is. Check the surname listing to see if your name is included. Please feel
free to send us your corrections or additions.

Can You Help?

May 9, 2014

We have had numerous inquiries asking if members of our family have
been through the process of proving their lineage for membership in the
Mayflower Society and similar organizations. Many, if not most of us, descend
from passengers arriving on the Mayflower in 1620. We know
that quite a few of our cousins have started the process for authentication,
but don't have any record of who they are or how far they've reached in the
process.

If you have started or completed the requirements for membership in any of
these organizations and would be willing to mentor a cousin, please
contact us here and we will help put you
together with them.

We sometimes are criticized because we include information in our family tree which has
not been genealogically documented and proven. We are told, "No real genealogist
would publish an educated guess, or a family member's assertions, without providing solid,
documented proof." Guilty as charged.

The reason is simple. Even though the word "genealogy" can be found in our title, we
do not consider ourselves to be genealogists in the formal sense of the word. We are family
historians. We use any and all sources of information when considering what to present on
the website. Having said that, we do make a conscious effort to document everything we
can. Where we cannot, we try to make clear our sources and reasoning.

Occasionally, people will offer to sell us documents or family memorabilia, but as a free
service to our members, we do not have the funds to purchase them. To make matters
worse, government birth, death and military records have become quite expensive and
restrictive. "Real" genealogists and other family researchers should consider information
found here as a starting point only, a hint about where to look for formal proof. In return,
we would appreciate corrections and additions stemming from such research.

"Blessings of a Legacy," written by Vera Bisbee Underhill
with Diane Cannon Wood, 1997, 122 pages, with many photos and copies of
original documents, is still available in both
hardback and soft cover, but in very limited quantities (about 10 each) from
Fred Underhill. Fred, whose mother wrote the book, is a family historian and
active member of the
New England Historical Society. He has generously agreed to mail remaining copies
at $30 for hard cover and $18 for paperback with free shipping if you contact him
at the address below.

The book recounts the everyday lives of the
Hopestill Bisbee
family of North Rochester, Massachusetts and their
descendants. According to Dianne Cannon Wood, the book provides, "snapshots of a family's life
while history was going on around them. The Bisbees were touched by such major
events as the settling of Plymouth Colony, The Revolutionary War, the Second
Great Awakening, and the 1849 Goldrush."

If you are a member or descendant of the Bisbee Family, if you are interested in your
own history and want to pass it on to your children, this book makes a great
addition to your family history library.
Please don't wait until they are gone. Order your own copy now from:

Schooner William Bisbee

Named after a famous General, William Henry Bisbee,
this story of the schooner William Bisbee a.k.a the Jose Gaspar,
is a fascinating history told with extraordinary photos and newspaper
articles of a collision and later on a mutiny. Near the end of her life
she even sailed as a pirate ship!

The 1940 US Census is now available. We continue to gather and abstract information
from all census years to supplement and support the data on our website. We provide
complete family snapshots for each census citation, and you can access them by clicking on
the citation's source link in the footnotes at the bottom of personal pages.

Maintaining An Online Presence

Genealogy is an obsession that usually afflicts older people with a
seasoned appreciation for life. All too often we die and our research
sits in a cardboard box in somebody's garage for years before being
thrown out. A genealogy website can suffer the same fate without
someone to step up and care for it.

A successor only needs to have an abiding interest in family
history and a willingness to learn how to use the tools availble to
add or edit content on an existing website.

If you are a member or descendant of the Bisbee Family, if you are
interested in your own history, and if you have computer skills or want
to learn how to become a backup webmaster, please let us know here at
the Bisbee Family
Connection. Let's talk and see if we can keep our online heritage
alive for another generation.